What’s less visible is how our new approach benefits our valued banking partners. We have always pledged that Google Wallet would be open to all card issuers at no cost. And by moving Google Wallet to the cloud, we have greatly simplified the way that card issuers integrate with it. Issuers no longer need to connect their systems directly to ours. We have completely eliminated the cost and complexity for issuers to offer their customers their cards in a mobile wallet. What was previously an effort that could take many months, cost millions, and require complex orchestration among many parties has been reduced to a few simple steps.

Even though direct integration is no longer a prerequisite for having your banks’ cards in Google Wallet, we encourage issuing banks to take some steps to give their customers great experiences with the wallet.

Provide us with card art - our mobile wallet shows card art from issuing banks that have provided us with imagery. Card art is an important representation of your bank’s brand, and by adding your card art to Google Wallet, you help Wallet users recognize their cards.

Barclaycard US, Green Dot, and Silicon Valley Bank are some of the first card issuers to provide us with card art. Reinforcing our commitment to all financial institutions, credit union partners of PSCU, a leading credit union service organization, can now easily work with Google Wallet by simply reaching out to their PSCU account executive. We are actively working with credit, debit, and prepaid card issuers of all sizes.

Implement our Save to Wallet API for Payment Cards - this API allows you to add a button to your website so that your customers can easily save their cards to Google Wallet in just a few clicks. Both Discover and Barclaycard US (via the L.L. Bean and US Airways co-branded Barclaycard US programs) have recently launched their implementations. Below are some screenshots of the Barclaycard US’ user flow — you can see that users never need to enter their card information into Google Wallet. Instead they save their card to Google Wallet by signing into their already familiar Google Account.